The Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg once estimated that malaria has killed half of the people who have ever lived. In 2015 alone, it killed almost half a million people, 70 percent of which were children. Today, about 3.2 billion people are, according to the World Health Organization, at risk of contracting it, most of whom are children and pregnant women. Henrik Sorensen/Getty ImagesIt’s brought on by a blood parasite—about 50 times smaller than the width of a human hair—the most common and deadly of which is Plasmodium falciparum, which thrives in Sub-Saharan Africa. It rides on the needle-like mouth of a mosquito, known as a proboscis, until it gets injected into the bug’s next blood meal. If the victim happens to be human, the first symptoms from the attack are flu-like: fever, (...)